He's 27, he claims to have unlocked the real secret to virality, and he's ready to make some (well, a lot of) money off of it. And maybe make the world a better place, too.

He's at it again. Emerson Spartz, the kid from LaPorte, Indiana who left junior high at age 12 to home school himself; started the largest Harry Potter website in the world, MuggleNet; authored a New York Times bestseller before age 20; launched a cutting-edge media/tech company that hosts 20 websites which have generated billions of page views; stopped teenagers from committing suicide with the site Gives Me Hope; snapped quite a few heads back with OMG Sex Facts; that kid, now 27, has released his most revolutionary and fastest-growing website yet, dose. And with it, his company, Spartz Media, thinks it has finally unlocked the secret to virality. Yes, there's software involved.

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To me, virality is the closest that we can get to having a human superpower.

If you could make things viral, you could tip elections, you could overthrow dictators, you could start movements, you could revolutionize industries . . .

. . . and you could get a heart-felt voicemail from a mother saying your website saved her daughter's life.

In third grade if something went wrong with the computer I was the kid who'd have to fix it.

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We were studying long division back then and I remember wondering: Why is it necessary to learn how to do long division if a computer can do it easily? It seemed like a pointless waste of our creative faculties to learn something that a computer can do instantaneously with perfect precision and accuracy. That's stuck with me for the rest of my life.

Learning how to learn is like wishing for more wishes.

Our education system was built on ideas that existed before we were even exposed to the germ theory of disease. It's based on industrial revolution-era thinking about how learning and memory work.

Because I went very deep into understanding how learning and memory work, I understand how deeply flawed the system is. For example, the education model is built on a lecture format, where you have one person communicating ideas verbally to many. This is literally the worst possible way to communicate information for learning purposes. On average this particular format leads to a 4 percent retention of the information roughly 24 hours later.

Right now, virality is an art. We know art works, but we don't know why it works. Eventually science will explain why.

We're a tech company that is masquerading as a media company. Most of the company is comprised of engineers and data scientists. We're scientists who are decoding the puzzle of virality.

Influence scales logarithmically. The more influence you accumulate, the easier it is to accumulate more influence.

If you could turn virality into a science, your ability to influence the world would be increased exponentially.

Ultimately, people share things that make them look cool. They want to project a certain image to the world. This is the reason why people will share content they don't even read because they're sharing it from The New Yorker or The Economist. It makes them look smart.

This is also the reason why nobody shares porn. We all want to project a certain identity to the world. We want people to think of us in a favorable way. And sharing porn does not present us in the most favorable light.

Hundreds of thousands of years ago we were cavemen sitting around a fire. The only entertainment option back then was to listen to the wise man tell stories.

Then a technology came along and we were able to transmit stories by painting on walls. Paper came along, then the printing press, and you could choose between 20 newspapers. Then came radio, and three TV stations, then 50 stations with cable, and 500 with satellite. Then came the Internet, and there were 5 trillion websites that you could look at. Now we have technology like Pandora which helps you sift through all of this and show you the content that is going to be most relevant to you.

As technology proceeds at an exponentially accelerating pace, the number of options for what content we can consume expands exponentially. Meanwhile, the tools that are able to sift through this giant ocean of available content are getting more powerful.

There are trillions of pieces of content uploaded to the web every day. Of those trillions, maybe there were five that could almost move you to tears. At dose, we find those five, and show them to you.

We approach the media experience very differently than other companies. We don't expect you to come to dose to experience dose. We're so good at creating content that spreads that we know you're going to see our content even if you don't come to the website.

If we do a bad job at creating content at dose, you'll never see that content.

When I left school in junior high, my dad wanted me to immerse myself into the mindsets and challenges and problems faced by the most successful people of all time with the idea that it would rub off on me. He'd print out the "Leaders & Success" profiles in Investor's Business Daily and insist that I'd read them. They were snack-sized biographies, but you'd see the same patterns over and over again. The people came from all different walks of life. They faced different obstacles and they always overcome those obstacles. Typically, they'd fail a number of times before they succeeded. But they had the persistence to get up again and again.

All the clichés are true. Persistence pays off.

But when you see thousands of examples of those clichés in action and you understand who these people were and why that cliché was true for them, you begin to develop a much stronger neural net to support that idea, rather than some old person telling you to be persistent.

I don't consider myself a technologist. I consider myself a student of human nature and a student of the patterns of success. Technology is just one arrow in the quiver.

Set in motion as many positive feedback loops as possible. You will reap the rewards five years later, ten years later, twenty years later . . .

Generally speaking, I want to change the world by making a positive impact on the lives of billions of people.

If you understand what you're going to do next, and you understand what you're going to eventually do, then the middle part will work itself out.

Up to now I've hit a lot of singles and doubles. I haven't yet swung for the home run.